Discovering
What’s Right When You
Re/Write
by Peter Gil-Sheridan
This past Spring the Cherry Lane Theatre
chose my play Topsy Turvy Mouse to
be a part of their annual Mentor Project.
I was thrilled. This would be my first production in
New York that was not mounted by friends or friends of
friends.
In my application I wrote that I wanted to have the opportunity
to work on a process-oriented production so that I could
hone my skills as a rewriter. My trouble as a rewriter
is that I am a pleaser, a populist, a bottom! If I respect
the respondent, I’ll assume what they’re
saying about my play must be true. I have had the terrible
experience
of desperately digging myself deeper into a hole in an
attempt to answer every single person’s questions.
But of course respondents’ questions contradict
one another. How do I know who is asking the right questions?
I think this is why I’ve never been so good at
standardized tests. Most of the answers seem like they
could be right.
Deciphering who is asking the right questions
is an art that my wonderful mentor, Michael Weller,
was determined
to teach me. When we first sat down in a coffee shop
in Brooklyn, Michael encouraged me to think very deeply
about
the off-stage lives of my characters. My play is a
fictionalized account of what it might be like to the
child of two
prison guards at Abu Ghraib. The basic premise is that
the couple
has moved on and changed their identities so that their
child can live a life without judgment. Naturally,
they are unable to escape the truth of themselves and
gradually,
the young boy uncovers who his family really is. My
play is built on the unspoken, on secrets. Michael pointed
out that I didn’t necessarily need to include
all the background information in the body of the play
but
that
I needed to have it firmly planted in my head. Certainly,
when I first wrote it I did. But as time passes and
notes go missing and new plays get written, what remains
is
the on-the-page lives of the characters. The details
had definitely
gotten a little fuzzy. Meanwhile, my directors, initially
Joanna Settle and then Daniella Topol, were sending
great questions my way (with both directors, I was
BLESSED
to have directors that were invested in the play, protective
of what was there, and yet they offered compelling
questions.) Too, questions were coming from my agent
and the astute
artistic staff of the theatre.
Then we started rehearsals.
The actors had loads of questions, the kind of nuts
and bolts questions that
hinge the play
together. The Cherry Lane encourages an open environment
of discussion and I, perhaps rightly, perhaps wrongly,
sought to answer a lot of the questions in the room,
almost I think as a way of not having to answer them
in my writing.
Should a playwright talk in the room? Should a playwright
remain absolutely silent? There are many philosophies
here, but looking back, I think I should have definitely
talked
less. I should have allowed questions to hover in the
air for more than a few minutes, because trying to
solve them
quickly so often complicates them. At the time, I felt
hurried. And yet it was that hurry that made me work
so rigorously. Within days, I was deep in despair.
It suddenly
felt that the entire premise of my play had unraveled.
There were so many questions that I could not answer
that I hardly knew where to begin. Still, I tried.
I answered
by rewriting almost every night, all night. I would
bring in one draft, then toss it out, and then I’d
bring in another draft, reordered and cut up. I started
to wonder
if I was actually answering questions that I cared
to answer or if I was just answering questions because
I wanted everyone
to know that I understood their questions.
Hours before
opening, I turned in my final rewrite. The production
came together wonderfully. An audience
member
who’d seen a reading three months earlier said
to me, “Congratulations Peter, the script is
pretty much the same, isn’t it? It’s wonderful.”
Three
drinks later, I realized that even though so much had
changed in the script, I hadn’t lost the backbone
of my play, that I was in fact able to please a good number
of my questioners in my own way. I’m still not certain
if I ever know who is asking the right questions, but what
I learned definitively at the Cherry Lane is that the right
questions will persist. The right questions will show their
faces in many forms. It’s just my job to listen for
them. |
